Urban Data Infrastructures

In Gabrys’s reading, she asked: What are the processes that these infrastructures instigate and sustain? How do they at once individuate and join up cities and citizens? What are the capacities of these infrastructures and what modes of inhabitation do they facilitate? She answered these question by the environmental approaches which bring up the idea of withness. However, the environmental quality is not how I image the withness. Could it be a hybrid solution which combine environmental approaches with moving approaches?

 

Considering the digital infrastructures as the physical infrastructure which is eventually going to be have some sort of maintenance. But different form the physical infrastructure such as road, we can partially fix it. The digital infrastructure such as sensors are all connected. How do we maintain the service of the digital infrastructure? If like Gabrys described, digital sensors are embedding into the environment, will be increase the difficulty of maintenance. Or the system could be node to node.

 

“Smart Urbanism” touched the concern about the corporatization of governance. Are there ways to result the conflict between the operation of smart city and the “profit” of smart. So the building process of smart city can equality distribute the benefit. One idea I have in mind is requiring the customized “dashboard”. The London dashboard and Dublin dashboard should not be the same. Each of them should be more specific focus on their own city problem in term of city management. Then this raise another question: who is willing to putting the extra effort?

Urban Data Infrastructures – Germania Garzon

Program Earth: Digital Infrastructures of Withness – Gabrys

– “How are we with the (smart) city, its infrastructure, its other inhabitants, and the many computational devices that would steer us, when emphasis is placed on coordinating ows of movement so that stoppage, disruption, breakage, and jamming are minimized? What is the withness of a ceaselessly owing city, of a city that never stops, that in its automated e ciency continues to process goods, information, and waste in the small hours of the night? Clearly, to discuss digital infrastructures of withness then also requires attending to infrastructure as pro- cess.”

– This concept of ‘with-ness’ between urban engagements and its citizens is interesting to look at currently, how are citizens currently “with” the city they inhabit?

– What are some steps that we as participating citizens of an urban environment could take in the direction of ‘with-ness’ rather than ‘self-ness’ and become a bigger role in process infrastructure?

 

Smart cities and the politics of Urban Date – Kitchen, Lauriault & McArdle

– In the reading, they mention that some municipalities believe in certain politics of indicator, benchmarking and dashboard initiatives like “rational, mechanical, linear and hierarchical” managerial systems that can easily controlled while others believe in more contextual, unpredictable, interdependental systems.

– Are we looking for a middle ground between these different forms of governance?

– What are some ways we see these different forms of governance right now, and how are they affecting citizens and cities?

Urban Data Infrastructures

 

As argued in the text, “Indicator, benchmarking and dashboad initiatives thus inherently express a normative notion about what should be measured and how it should be measured. The are full of values, judgements and deliberate strategies of occlusion […] They not only present urban systems, but actively help produce them” (p.28) In this scenario, what are the paths to create policies, auditing, or participating in such models of shaping the city?

On Gabrys’s text, if withness is understood as “an articulation of processes of participatinf that involve becoming together, across and extended array of entities, and setting in motion the connections and inheritance that take hold to become something like urban infrastrucure” (p. 263) How does withnessing address the problem of the different forms of agency that comes into the design of technology and into urban planning? Sepecially when as stated by the own text “Our urban future is differently distributed depending upon how close to the machine we are” (p. 264)

Also in Gabrys’s text, how does her proposal of “speculative cities” takes  into account the contingency and indeterminacy proposed by Simondon to open new paths of active agency over the city, or to new forms of participation?

Urban Data Infrastructures – Sandra

Smart cities and the politics of urban data – Kitchin, Lauriault, McArdle

– “…these new systems lead to the discontinuation of analogue alternatives, meaning that if they fail there are no alternatives until the system is fixed/rebooted.” Certainly in early implementation, there are bound to be glitches, failures and hacks on new “smart” systems. Should we leave a skeleton of older analogue systems to default back to when/if this happens? How much of the prior infrastructure should we leave behind as a failsafe, and for how long?

– “Reducing the city to a collection of facts decontextualizes it from its history, its political economy, the wider set of social, economic and environmental relations that frame its development and its interconnections and interdependencies that stretch out over space and time.” Can the same not be said for the people living in the cities? Reducing people down to a collection of statistics diminishes their expression, culture and individualism. If the consequences of corporate interests mean that cities are reduced to facts and citizens are represented by statistics in the name of efficiency and market growth, what kind of societal loss will we meet?

– “Dashboards facilitate the illusion that it is possible to ‘picture the totality of the urban domain’, to translate the messiness and complexities of cities into rational, detailed, systematic, ordered forms of knowledge.” They also have a hierarchy. Information can be highlighted or hidden from the public/figureheads depending on what the person/group presenting the information wants shown. It can be that a viewer is overwhelmed with information, and therefore does not see a statistic hidden in plain sight. Will municipalities claim transparency while burying unpleasant information in more positive material?

 

Digital Infrastructure of Withness: Constructing a Speculative City – Gabrys

– ” The city also never sleeps, as it efficiently and automatically activates, restocks, recharges, and recycles during the night.” Why, exactly, does the city need to rest and recharge at all? Can a smart city, made up of machines not be continuously working?

– “Those that can speak to it, in its language, stand a better chance of counting and being taken into account as a relevant node in its networks. Those who do not may find they cannot get a foothold in the world the smart city has made and possessed.” What happens to those who either cannot or will not accept and join a “smart” society? Do they get left behind? Is the population eased into a new, smart lifestyle or forced into it?

W06 Urban Data Infrastructures – nida ali

W06

Program Earth: Environmental Sensing of Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet.

Digital Infrastructures of Withness – Jennifer Gabrys

 

  1. “The smart city as built and imagined seems to toggle in this in- between zone, instantiated in some ways but always leaning toward a more complete automation, a more fully self- regulating (and so sustainable) organism that monitors, responds, and adapts in real time in order to achieve the most efficient and optimized balance of resources, time, and money. Sensors becoming networks becoming smart cities all appear to be on a trajectory toward an urban organism that acquires an uncanny intelligence and ability to manage the city as planner, architect, and engineer all rolled into one. But when might this phase- change occur, when sensors and networks take on a life of their own and begin to organize their own automated processes within the city.”

How does this automated urban organism which takes sensors and networks into account function within the parameters and modes of ‘withness’ (human and non- human)? What are its shortcoming when dealing with participation and interaction amongst other networks and or humans?  How can the infrastructural aspects of smart cities, which include the processes of measurement, automatism, and contingency, be qualified or take experience and perception into account? If these smart cities are managed by cybernetic entities, which are non-intelligent learning systems (feedback into account), how is its process of decision making determined? Do they need human intervention in order to make decisions?

  1. “Designing infrastructure is designing action.” This statement could easily be read in a deterministic way, where the structures of infrastructure are seen to offer automatic scripts or codes for action. But the statement could also be read less causally and more simultaneously, where infrastructures and actions coincide as entangled and co- emergent processes. A study of infrastructure could very well attend to the actions that are productive of infrastructures, as well as infrastructures that are productive of actions. This raises the question of how actions unfold within and through automated urban infrastructures.”

From Simondon’s perspective would this infrastructure of machines be sacrificing its ‘functional possibilities and many of its possible uses’  in order to make a machines automatic since these machines are engaging in a set of operations that incorporate openness and participation (human involvement)? His discussion of the pre-individual reserve “what counts as “human” is also not fixed or settled, since machinic engagements also give rise to distinct transindividuations of the entities involved.” Can the idea of tranindividuation, which takes both an individual subject and a collective subject, be applicable to automated urban infrastructures that are productive of both action and infrastructures relative to human interaction? How would humans be inputs or inputs in such systems? Are humans only considered as a source or node of information in such systems?

  1. “Yet as Simone reminds us in his writings on the practices of infrastructure, these are characterized by situated contingencies, where people may even tinker with and alter the city and its infrastructure. Contingencies in the smart city may emerge across human and more- than- human registers, moreover, since as the city “plays itself ” it no doubt is not simply adapting for optimization but is also generating particular materializations of sensor- spaces, transforming environments through programs of more- than- automatism, and giving rise to proliferating bugs and blockages that are sites for ongoing repair.”

Smart cities or automated urban infrastructures like any other system contain negative contingencies, are their systems or models developed to predict such contingencies? How do these contingencies take the human register / intervention into account? Does the process of constant feedback and optimization effect contingencies of a smart city relative to modes of withness (human / non-human). Are these newly generated technological practices, inhabitations and ways of life due to the integration of technology within the automated urban infrastructure not only modify human behavior but also sensor-actuator operations? Is it because a smart city and participatory urbanism projects reduce technology to a “utensil,” as Simondon has termed it, focusing on optimization, rather than on quality of life?

“This means that rather than search between determinist or constructivist approaches to technology, we might attend to how new entities, relations, and modalities of withness contingent on infection and persuasion generate new technological practices, inhabitations, and ways of life.”

 

Smart Cities and Politics of Urban Data – Rob Kitchin, Tracey Lauriault and Gavin McArdle

  1. What types of contingencies are there concerning smart cities when dealing with ‘panoptic surveillance’ or ‘dataveillance’ and security? Since smart cities have, numerous networks are there any precautions and fail-safe mechanisms to deal with hacking of its servers. To what extent are these systems open or closed systems, relative to citizen participation and privacy?
  1. Do corporate interests solely drive these systems? By taking users and consumers demands and participation into account, aren’t corporations building better cities for the people regardless or corporate interests? On the other hand, are these cities built for a certain demographic and hence caters to a certain types of users? Are then policies, decisions, laws, politics and data assemblage in favor of corporate interests and are then pushed and passed through because of corporate interest?

“It is the tension between the realist epistemology (data show the city as it actually is) and the instrumental rationality of smart city systems, and an alternative view that exposes the politics and assemblages of such data and systems.”

“These include anxieties related to the rise in technocratic governance, the corporatization of governance, the creation of buggy, brittle and hackable systems, panoptic surveillance, predictive profiling and social sorting and the politics of urban data.”

Emancipation from the demands of corporations possible when designing smart cities? Can both users and corporations co-exist amongst the many layers of smart cities infrastructure? Will some anxieties that are a part of the urban fabric of smart cities be addressed by and help produce better technological systems through feedback and optimization as the city “plays itself”?

 

Urban Data Infrastructures – Jiaqi

“Smart cities and the politics of urban data”

  • As the author mentioned in this book, “the fear for some commentators is the creation of highly vulnerable and costly urban systems, rather than robust systems that create efficiencies and resilience.” The author said “hackable”. Does that mean after smart city is hacked, it could not “smart” again or just say it is not under control anymore?  Will the infrastructures also can not regulating-self or say crashing, if we do not consider the cost of smart city before making it?
  • “…a fact is never simply a fact.Facts are produced, not simply measured.” The indicator, benchmarking, and dashboard all can not be a fact, but they could help measure a fact. When they all have been changing with the different time and space, does fact change along with them? But if fact is changing, why call it fact? Does Smart City need a fact?

“Digital Infrastructures of Witness: Constructing a Speculative City”

  • The author mentioned three witnesses here – measurement, automatism and contingency. Three of them, from my perspective, the hardest and easiest part is “contingency”. Because the most factors of contingency are citizens( sensing citizens & citizen sensing), the big data come from citizens and change along with citizens daily life and their routines. To say contingency is so hard to measure, manage and unpredictable, but why the author said contingency is a key way in which the concretization of digital infrastructure can be understood?

Urban Data Infrastructures

Digital Infrastructure Withness 

“The transformations that occur as smart cities migrate from an abstract and even speculative set of technologies to more concrete materializations,” What is concrete materialization author referring to.

“It is important to continue to extend the environmental aspects of computation in these ways, since it enables a more dynamic and processual understanding of how environments and digital media concresce to form actual entities and actual occasions,” How would these sensors work during any environment hazard?

“Sensors can be found overlapping with existing infrastructures, in some cases forming new networks; sensors are in place to monitor speci c temporary uses and events such as construction; sensors are monitoring air and vibration and water levels; and sensors are carried around in smartphones, as wearables, and other portable devices, whether as DIY citizen-sensing tools or monitors for detecting specific phenomena,” – does that mean participation by citizens is just using the digital infrastructure (lowest layer as discussed in previous lecture)?

 

 

Urban Data Infrastructure —-Shen

1 Smart cities and the politics of urban data

Technocratic governance is government under the data and suitable algorithms control. Those solutions created by algorithms should be always the best choice. In such cases will we lost control by algorithms? In the end those algorithms might destroy democracy?

 

Those concerns about smart city data most of them are already existing, there is an issue about data neutrality. Such as carbon dioxide rate, it used to believed carbon dioxide is main reason causing global warming, will in recent research shows that aren’t. data at our present perceive could be total different and might leading to serious problems.

2 Digital Infrastructures—-Jennifer Gabrys

 

The program earth as techno-geographies it easily confuse with GIS geographic information system. The GIS system also is a data collector testing bed which help making better decision and improved communication, but GIS is more likely a data recording. Should we use the sensing to track huge environment data? The environment seems like an invariable data model, which only change tiny in a decade.

 

Urban Data Infrastructures – Feng

Program Earth

    • Page 246 “Sensors are also not the only source for data generated to manage urban systems—alternative data sources include both static and dynamic data collected from social media streams, participatory-sensing systems, and predictive and strategic modeling capabilities.”

    For the direction of future smart cities. Should we try to make sensors become the only source for the collection of data? And is it good for the “previous” other sources?

  • Page 256 “This point draws on Simondon’s discus- sion of how relations are not formed through the adding up of individuals to form collectives. Rather, collectives are transindividuated into distinct entities, and it is this mode of parsing collective potential that in-forms individuals and relations.”How to understand this “relation”? Also, as we know, in sometime, the collective’s activities will cover some individuals’, even some important ones’ activities. So how to deal with this?

    Smart Urbanism

    • Page 18 “First, a technocratic approach is highly reductionist and functionalist, always based on a limited selection of data and shaped by the formulation of algorithms, and fails to recognise the wider effects of culture, politics, policy, governance and capital in shaping city life and urban systems.”

      The limited data is not always work bad. For example, people’s eyes will collect lots of information for visual, but their brains can not deal with those mass. Thus, the brain actually only use limited information from eyes’ collection, and it already enough to support the normal life of a human. So, why base on a limited selection of data will be a problem?

Urban Data Infrastructures—zhicheng zhang

1. In Kitchen, Lauriault & McArdle’s reading, it says that some municipalities, indicator, benchmarking and dashboard initiatives are being used to underpin forms of new managerialism. it just likes the the dashboard of an aircraft cockpit provides detailed data about a plane and its flight. reflect this to the experiment in the 1970s in chile, even the experiment failed for many reasons, in the last few month before it failed, it was be found that some information which should be collected from factories are delayed. In the smart city which relies on the data from the sensor, unlike bugs in the system, a delay may hard to notice., as a result, a delay could be a deadly disaster. how to deal with it when we live in a city which relies on the data so much?

 

2. In Gabrys’ reading, he said “Environments and environmental computation also constitute situations in which “withness” might be articulated and inform processes of participation. Withness, following Whitehead, is a concept that signals modes of being and becoming together,” if we put this “withness” to extreme, the city and the environment have extreme withness, will we human lost our position, and become only the data provider, or may less than this?

 

3. Because of the contingency of  the infrastructure, the relationship between the city and the citizen seems to be mutualism.  When the city finally could adapt only by itself, will the “withness” of the city and its citizen disappear?